The principles of unity and variety apply to all music, regardless of compositio
ID: 3142934 • Letter: T
Question
The principles of unity and variety apply to all music, regardless of compositional style or historical period. Now that you are familiar with the concepts in the first section of the course (Basic Musical Concepts), and you have seen how they work on different pieces of music, try your hand, mouse, and ears at how they operate in a music selection that you may not have heard yet.
Your analysis of the song, "Ma Ha De Carnival" should include: (Link to song is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTpLdK_jdu0
The number of different musical ideas in the piece (can we say, for example, that there are two ideas A, and B? Or is there only one?)
The timings (start and stop times) of the different sections of the piece. (Hint: Listen for changes in musical ideas and timbre, e.g. points where different instruments come in or give way to others.) NOTE: The first 15 seconds serves as an introduction to the example, and is not a musical idea. Also, the sections in this example are much longer than in the example in Assignment 1.
How unity and variety are exemplified in those sections through the use of:
Dynamics
Timbre
Pitch
Whether, although there are sections that feature one instrument over others, you think this is this is a piece for solo performer or for an ensemble.
A list of the characteristics of the musical style closest to the one this piece exemplifies. (Hint: Read the lecture entitled "Art Music, Folk Music and All That Jazz" for specific characteristics)
Whether you think this piece serves, or could serve a specific purpose. If so, what is it?
Whether or not it has any specific connotation/s for you. If so, what is it?
Explanation / Answer
To be clear: we are not talking here of ideas about music, but of ideas in music, that is to say, in pitches, timbres, rhythms, etc.The reasons for this are easy to discern. First, discussion of musical ideas in this sense requires far more practical experience writing music than many commentators possess. Second, it is less amenable to the aesthetic propaganda and feuds which, unfortunately, often fuel certain kinds of writing about music.
I myself consider the totality of a piece as the idea.
The analytical/theoretical literature rarely has much to say about criteria for the quality of musical ideas, and even less about how a given idea influences and/or determines the form of the resulting piece, except in the obvious sense of motivic derivations, and, in some more recent music, harmonic commonalities between lines and chords. Interesting though these connections may be, they usually say little or nothing about how or why the work attracts the listener. For the composer however, finding the presentation which will have the most impact on the listener is of capital importance.There is of course a good reason for this concentration on motives: By definition, a motive is a short, easily memorable musical unit. Memory being the mental faculty which enables us to perceive musical form in the first place, that which is easily memorable is a logical building block for musical form.
Further, motives are susceptible to many degrees of variation, ranging from the most obvious and elementary changes, to extremely esoteric transformations, only accessible to the eye. Of course the aspects of a musical idea which are easily audible must always have primacy. No piece is successful only or even mainly because of subtle motivic connections: By definition, these are not memorable! While a connoisseur’s experience may perhaps be enhanced by recognizing such subtler connections, they can never take the place of salient, audible structure, since the latter is what the listener normally follows. Put in another way, if the musical idea of a piece is not made manifest clearly and audibly, it can have no significant effect on the listener. Subtler details must enhance the effect of what is most salient if they are to be of any use at all.
http://alanbelkinmusic.com/site/en/index.php/on-musical-ideas/
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